For rattled Ireland, World Cup solutions won't come in a manual
There’s no instruction manual for managing these World Cup disappointments. In the early noughties, Spain went through a succession of big football tournament failures before finally winning the European championships in 2008.
They endured the torment of more penalty shootout drama in the quarter-final before stumbling past the Italians.
They hadn’t won a major tournament since 1964 and the spectre of inexplicable under-achievement hung over them like a pall. Eventually, they tweaked their system and toiled their way to success. Tiki-taka was born and through good process and habit, they found the key.
Munster had plenty of Heineken Cup disappointment before 2006. Well, I know it. In the half a dozen campaigns between the final loss at Twickenham in 2000 and the Cardiff breakthrough, I don’t remember anyone coming into training handing out manuals on the secret of success or unfurling a roadmap to guide us.
You work it out. You work at it. Japan were incredible in Shizuoka on Sunday and the defeat for Ireland isn’t fatal for their 2019 World Cup ambitions. It can be viewed through the prism of past failures in this tournament or it can be dealt with in terms of the process.
Which route do you think Joe Schmidt is going to choose?
Hindsight isn’t much use to him. That’s not to say Joe and the Irish management won’t take some important lessons from the defeat. They were quick, very quick, after the Scotland game to indicate that anyone who didn’t train Monday or Tuesday would not be selected. In the case of Johnny Sexton, hindsight would tell them that was a mistake in the context of game management.
That Ireland’s attack game didn’t fire as it should isn’t fatal of itself. But our inability to control the game, the manner in which Ireland almost fed Japan’s energy and tempo with their own lack of composure throughout the game was key to Ireland’s undoing.
Jack Carty did some nice things but the one thing you cannot coach is experience, especially in that environment when the demand is to take the sting out of the Japanese and the crowd. Some of Carty’s stuff was very natural, but more of it was in the realm of a rabbit in the headlight. But this happens.
Let’s talk Sexton, Bundee Aki and Robbie Henshaw for a moment. They didn’t play Saturday, so both from their point of view and from the perspective of a ‘different’ Ireland in a quarter-final, their return and their fitness could be very well-timed.
Johnny is a good strategist. He would have got the picture of what was in front of him on Saturday an awful lot better than Carty or even Joey Carbery, and that’s the value of big-game experience. That’s Sexton’s trump card at this stage of his career, managing games and situations and he will do that better than anyone else in green. He’d see a picture and get his troops into position. Johnny should be playing against Russia either way on Thursday. There’ll be no hard lines drawn through anyone so early in the week from now on.
On both sides of the ball, Ireland never had a grip of the game. They missed the intangible stuff experience brings. Garry Ringrose is still quite inexperienced, Chris Farrell’s an international rookie, and Jack Carty is in that nascent phase of his career at this level. There’s a skill in getting your wingers up and hitting guys and Jacob Stockdale’s defence was at the lower end of the spectrum compared to what I’d seen of him in the Scotland win. He wasn’t high in the defence line at all. I can’t explain that, whether that’s a player or a coaching issue.
Ireland were running back tackling Japan side on, which is not what you associate with this group. Look at the pressure they put on Stuart Hogg the week before. Did you see any of that on Saturday?
We all had bad Saturdays. I went from watching Japan make mincemeat of predictions to suffering the same fate with La Rochelle down in Bayonne.
12-0 up early, with two opportunities to go 19-0 up. The hosts had Census Johnson sent off before half-time at 12-7. We hit the post to make it 15-7 and the rest is bad. We lost 23-22 and a five-hour bus journey home was all we had to look forward to.
And plenty of chat about Japan.
Joey Carbery chose the right option to kick the ball dead at the end but with all the talk of that afterwards, too few were commenting on the most important Ireland moment of the match.
Keith Earls’ chase back and recovery tackle on Fukuoka preserved the bonus point and were far more decisive in terms of Ireland’s World Cup chances than Carbery’s clearance.
That actually procured a losing bonus point. Take the trouble to search for the clip and watch how Earls blew past Jordan Larmour to get back and make the saving tackle. At almost 32. So much for Father Time. Which is why he's laminated in every Irish team if available. That was awesome.
By the close of business, the only surprise was that Japan's seven-point winning margin wasn't greater.
All I kept thinking was who is their breakdown coach, who is managing their rucks, because the speed of their ball was something else. Even their Duracell bunny of a nine, Yutaka Nagara, couldn’t get there half the time. Japan seemed to have a consistent facility for loading players wide.
From width to width, or up the guts, it didn't seem to matter. Impressive stuff, but that's where Sexton would have been sucking their momentum and killing their tempo.
In strict pool terms, the loss isn't fatal. Scotland have their first five points on the board, and they will improve. At an Irish Examiner World Cup event in Cork recently, Johann van Graan was reminded he was with the Springboks when they lost to Japan four years ago, but he was able to counter that the Boks still went onto the World Cup semi-final, only losing 20-18 to the All Blacks.
It’s not that it sets Ireland on the back foot in terms of emerging from the pool, but it’s a serious dent to momentum. If you are preparing for a World Cup quarter-final against South Africa or New Zealand, you are getting no credits in the bank for beating Russia and Samoa en route. You’ve lost to Japan and that has to rattle you.
Even when Ireland led 12-3, Japan looked dangerous and the pressure Ireland put on the Scots in defence was conspicuous by its absence last Saturday.
Normally Ireland don’t let teams play, but they put absolutely zero pressure on Japan. They’d better learn the lessons because they could find a better team than Japan putting a lot more than 19 points on them in a quarter-final.
As a coach, there has to be a little bit of me thrilled that a gameplan can be executed with such accuracy. Watching Jamie Joseph and Tony Brown, seeing them execute with absolute precision a game plan years in the making is good for the sanity. But you still have to get it right on the day, and Ireland didn’t. Japan executed because their skill levels were good enough and their attitude was brilliant.
Whether anyone in the Irish camp had moved their focus, just a fraction, to South Africa, is neither here nor there now. Tough shit.
It might just be the All Blacks now.
*If Japan was the performance of the World Cup, Wales and Australia delivered the best game - and decided in the video analysis room in Welsh camp months ago. How Will Genia wasn’t tipped off that any skip passes beyond six or seven metres would be vulnerable to a Gareth Davies intercept beggars belief.
Or maybe he was. Either way, Wales were ready for it, and should have got 14 points off same, only that Davies dropped the second one.
It looks like Wales v France and England v Australia in the quarters. Don’t rule out the Wallabies. They are dangerous. In a bizarre way, they will take confidence out of that game. But Wales look steely, and potential semi-finalists at least.
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